Indie Bundle 8

This is the eighth entry in my series of reviews for the Steam Indie Bundles. Each review is short and subjective, and is geared to give you a quick look at the game. Indie Bundle 8 includes: Demolition Inc, HOARD, SOL: Exodus, Swords and Soldiers HD, and Wings of Prey.

Demolition Inc

This is a fantastic way to kick off a bundle. Multimon goodness in all its glory, good graphics, and fun gameplay all combine in this destruct-a-thon.

So you're an alien, flying above the city. The population below go about their lives, driving their cars around all innocent and sweet. Too bad they are the pawns in your grand master plan. Your job is to demolish the city by causing the traffic to drive into buildings and knock them down, so they can be replaced by trees. For instance, you can deploy oil slicks to cause the cars to lose control and go swerving into conveniently placed cans of fuel.

It's pretty fun finding different ways to get the cars to go out of control where you want them to - it doesn't always go to plan but sometimes it works out better than you could have expected. I rate this for a bit of fun, and multimon is great. 8/10.

HOARD

Another game that works in multimon, fantastic, although the objective overlay is stretched. The gameplay is fairly good, but just lacks that little something to keep me interested.

You play as a dragon flying around, avoiding people trying to kill you, burning things down, and hoarding the gold that appears. That's about it.

The game is interesting and fun, but just isn't great. 7/10

SOL: Exodus

It's been a long time since a space fighter game has sucked me in, but this did, big time. The biggest shame about this game is that it doesn't support multimon properly, because it would be PERFECT for multimon. At least they have made an in-game option to change the game from it's normal Vert- behaviour to Hor+. You can force a multimon res but the HUD is stretched across 3 monitors and it looks terrible.

In this game, you're a fighter pilot in a large fleet that are investigating a possible replacement planet for mankind as the sun for Earth is dying. Naturally, not everything goes as smoothly as one would hope, and you're thrown into the mix. The game teaches you the controls under the tutorial of a test flight for your ship, which works well, and then before you know it, you're put to the test hardcore. I will admit to dying on my first attempt.

Perhaps it's the flight sim nature in me, but I instantly wanted to start kicking butt and learning how to get the most out of the craft I was in. I will add that this is probably best played with a joystick. Loses a point for what could have been in multimon, but still fun and I'll be playing it again. This is a contender for the best of the whole indie bundle series. 9/10

Swords and Soldiers HD

This game is pretty fun, driven by nice graphics and humour that is actually funny. The game is a sidescroller where you deploy rather large breasted women who mine gold for you to fund your campaign. This allows you to unlock units and spells with which to attack the bad guys.

The game doesn't work well in all multimon resolutions. At 6000x1080, the screen flickers and the mouse acceleration sucks. I think it's because the map is smaller than the resolution in width that it struggles.

The game is simple enough yet keeps you busy trying to keep your dudes alive with the available spells. Alternatively, you can just brute force and try sending as many fighters as you can muster.

It's fairly simple, it's fun, I'll be having another crack at it. 8/10

Wings of Prey

I love flight sims, what can I say. I work in one. And this one is epicly great.

The graphics are stunningly beautiful, I could just fly around looking at the scenery. The planes are incredible, and the missions really give you a feel of how incredible and desperate it was living in World War 2.

Multimon is supported, although some parts of the game don't work with it, such as the aircraft hangar. However, for flying, it's just great.

This game ticks all my boxes. The difficulty can be scaled for all types of players, and the action is fun and challenging. I also enjoy the option of flying back to the airbase if you want, although players can end the mission once they have completed the objectives if they wish to save time. If the aircraft hangar wasn't broken, this game would be perfect. It's one of the games I keep coming back to, and it's one that I use when I want to show off how glorious multimon is to my friends when they visit. 9.5/10

Summary

There is a great deal of value to be had in this bundle. Probably don't worry about Hoard too much, but you'll get countless hours of gaming value from the others. Wings of Prey is worth it by itself. This is definitely the best bundle for people who enjoy flight sims, and still excellent if you don't. Do yourself a favour, get into a beautiful WW2 plane in full multimon and just go for a flight; enjoy how far gaming has come.